How good were the 1990s for action fans? Movie stars were chewing up the scenery, practical stunts were doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and studios were handing filmmakers huge budgets to crash cars, destroy buildings and generally make a glorious mess, often with little concern for family-friendly tastes.

The decade also caught the genre in transition. Old-school muscle was still everywhere, Hong Kong action was having a huge influence on Hollywood, and by the time 1999 rolled around, The Matrix was pointing action and sci-fi cinema towards an entirely different kind of blockbuster.

We’re not ranking these. That way lies madness. Instead, here’s a chronological run through 30 action movies that helped make the ’90s such a great decade for the genre.

Total Recall (1990)

Arnold Schwarzenegger gets his ass to Mars in Paul Verhoeven’s wonderfully nasty sci-fi actioner, playing construction worker Douglas Quaid, whose attempt to buy implanted memories of a Martian holiday leaves him wondering whether his entire life is a lie.

Sharon Stone, Rachel Ticotin and Michael Ironside join the chaos, which includes mutants, exploding heads and some magnificently squishy practical effects. Based on Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, it’s brainy enough to keep you guessing and bonkers enough to never slow down.

Die Hard 2 (1990)

John McClane can’t even collect his wife from the airport without finding himself in another terrorist nightmare. Bruce Willis is back as the perpetually unlucky cop, this time battling mercenaries who seize control of Washington Dulles International Airport while planes circle overhead with fuel running out.

Renny Harlin pushes everything bigger than the first film, from snowmobile chases to exploding aircraft. Fun fact: the basic story didn’t actually begin life as a Die Hard sequel. It was adapted from Walter Wager’s 1987 novel 58 Minutes, with McClane and company worked into the material.

Point Break (1991)

Surfing, skydiving, bank robberies and one of action cinema’s great bromances. Kathryn Bigelow directs Keanu Reeves as rookie FBI agent Johnny Utah, who goes undercover among a group of surfers believed to be the masked bank robbers known as the Ex-Presidents.

Then he meets Patrick Swayze’s Bodhi, a magnetic adrenaline junkie with a near-spiritual devotion to chasing the next rush. Gary Busey and Lori Petty add to a film that’s cool, tense, slightly ridiculous and far more emotionally invested in Utah and Bodhi’s relationship than it has any right to be.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

James Cameron didn’t just make a bigger sequel; he flipped the whole setup. Schwarzenegger’s T-800 is now the good guy, sent back to protect young John Connor (Edward Furlong) from Robert Patrick’s terrifying liquid-metal T-1000, while Linda Hamilton returns as a completely transformed Sarah Connor.

The truck chase, the canal, Cyberdyne, the minigun, the steel-mill finale… it’s almost obnoxious how many classic sequences Cameron packs in. With a reported budget around the $100 million mark, T2 was the most expensive film ever made at the time. You can see where the money went.

The Last Boy Scout (1991)

Bruce Willis and Damon Wayans make a magnificently miserable pairing in Tony Scott’s hard-boiled action thriller, scripted by Shane Black. Willis is burnt-out private investigator Joe Hallenbeck, Wayans is disgraced football player Jimmy Dix, and a murder drags both men into a nasty conspiracy involving professional football and gambling.

It’s mean, violent and extremely foul-mouthed, with the kind of dialogue that could only come from Black at full swagger. Scott, meanwhile, makes Los Angeles look appropriately grimy and dangerous. Cheerful viewing this is not. Entertaining? Absolutely.

Universal Soldier (1992)

Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren play soldiers killed in Vietnam, revived years later and turned into near-indestructible government weapons. That’s a very ’90s sentence.

Roland Emmerich directs Van Damme as Luc Deveraux, whose buried memories begin coming back just as Lundgren’s Andrew Scott starts remembering that he was completely unhinged. The result is a sci-fi actioner built around the obvious attraction: two enormous action stars eventually beating the hell out of each other.

Hard Boiled (1992)

Before heading to Hollywood, John Woo left Hong Kong with one hell of a calling card. Chow Yun-fat stars as hard-nosed cop “Tequila” Yuen, whose pursuit of a gun-running syndicate brings him together with Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s undercover officer.

The story is almost secondary once Woo starts staging the action. Guns blaze, motorbikes explode, bodies fly through the air and the camera somehow glides through it all with balletic precision. The famous hospital climax remains an outrageous piece of filmmaking and a reminder of just how influential Woo’s Hong Kong work became.

Cliffhanger (1993)

Sylvester Stallone heads into the mountains for Renny Harlin’s terrific high-altitude thriller. He plays rescue climber Gabe Walker, who’s pulled into a hunt for millions in stolen cash after a gang of criminals crash-lands in the Rockies.

John Lithgow is clearly enjoying every second of villain duty, while the stunt work still makes your palms sweat. One aerial sequence reportedly cost $1 million, with stuntman Simon Crane crossing between two jets at 15,000 feet. Guinness World Records recognises it as the most expensive aerial film stunt.

Demolition Man (1993)

Stallone and Wesley Snipes are thawed out in a future that has eliminated violent crime, swearing, unhealthy food and, apparently, conventional toilet paper. Naturally, neither man adjusts particularly well.

Marco Brambilla’s sci-fi action comedy has Stallone’s old-school cop John Spartan chasing Snipes’ gloriously manic Simon Phoenix through a sanitised 2032, with Sandra Bullock providing much of the comedy as future cop Lenina Huxley. And yes, decades later we’re still talking about the three seashells.

The Fugitive (1993)

Harrison Ford is Dr Richard Kimble, wrongly convicted of murdering his wife and suddenly on the run after a spectacular prison transport escape. Tommy Lee Jones is U.S. Marshal Samuel Gerard, whose response to Kimble’s claims of innocence is basically: not my problem.

Andrew Davis keeps the chase moving without sacrificing the mystery, and Ford and Jones are both completely locked in. The wrecked train from the escape sequence wasn’t just miniature work, either: a real locomotive was crashed for the production in North Carolina, where the wreckage remains.

True Lies (1994)

James Cameron looked at the spy movie and decided it needed Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, nuclear weapons and a Harrier jet. Fair enough.

Schwarzenegger plays Harry Tasker, an elite secret agent whose wife Helen believes he’s a dull computer salesman. Marital problems and international terrorism eventually collide, with Tom Arnold and Bill Paxton stealing plenty of scenes along the way. Something that’s easy to forget: True Lies is actually a remake of Claude Zidi’s 1991 French spy comedy La Totale!. Cameron just gave the premise a rather more expensive workout.

Speed (1994)

A bus will explode if it drops below 50 miles per hour. That’s the hook, and director Jan de Bont wrings almost two hours of terrific suspense out of it.

Reeves is LAPD officer Jack Traven, Sandra Bullock is passenger-turned-driver Annie Porter, and the two exude charm and chemistry through all the stress as Dennis Hopper’s bomb-happy baddie turns their commute into hell. Speed was de Bont’s feature directing debut, but he was hardly new to action: he’d already served as cinematographer on films including Die Hard.

Léon: The Professional (1994)

Jean Reno plays Léon, a quiet and ruthlessly efficient hitman who unexpectedly becomes the protector of 12-year-old Mathilda, played by Natalie Portman in her feature-film debut, after her family is murdered by corrupt DEA agents.

Luc Besson directs with plenty of style, while Gary Oldman goes huge as the spectacularly unstable Norman Stansfield. It’s darker and stranger than most of the films on this list, but when the action hits, it hits hard.

Bad Boys (1995)

Michael Bay’s feature directing debut gave Will Smith and Martin Lawrence a stolen shipment of heroin, a pile of guns and plenty of Miami streets to tear through.

Their chemistry and that early brand of Bayhem proved a franchise-starting hit. Smith’s slick Mike Lowrey and Lawrence’s increasingly stressed Marcus Burnett bounce off each other through shootouts, chases and one very messy investigation. Here’s a strange alternate-universe version to imagine: the project was originally developed with Dana Carvey and Jon Lovitz in mind. Yep. Very different movie.

Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)

John McClane gets out of enclosed buildings and is rewarded with an entire New York City full of problems. Original Die Hard director John McTiernan returns, while Samuel L. Jackson joins Willis as Zeus Carver, the very unwilling partner dragged into the madness.

Jeremy Irons’ mysterious Simon sends the pair racing across Manhattan solving riddles and trying to prevent bombings, all while a larger scheme slowly comes into focus. Willis and Jackson are fantastic together, and McTiernan keeps the thing moving at a breathless pace.

GoldenEye (1995)

After six years without a new Bond film, Pierce Brosnan had a fair bit riding on his first outing as 007. Director Martin Campbell makes sure the comeback lands.

Sean Bean’s former MI6 agent Alec Trevelyan gives Bond a villain with a personal connection, Famke Janssen is unforgettable as Xenia Onatopp, and Judi Dench makes her first appearance as M. Throw in the dam jump, the tank tearing through St Petersburg and that Tina Turner theme song, and the franchise suddenly felt very alive again.

Heat (1995)

Yes, Heat is a sprawling crime drama. It also has one of the greatest shootouts ever filmed, so it’s staying right here.

Michael Mann pits Al Pacino’s obsessive detective Vincent Hanna against Robert De Niro’s meticulous thief Neil McCauley, with Val Kilmer leading an absurdly strong supporting cast. Mann had actually told an earlier, stripped-down version of this story in his 1989 TV film L.A. Takedown. Heat gave him the time, budget and cast to finally do it at full scale.

Desperado (1995)

Antonio Banderas arrives carrying a guitar case full of guns and Robert Rodriguez wastes very little time putting it to use in this sexy, violent, slickly entertaining actioner.

Banderas’ wandering gunslinger is hunting drug lord Bucho, with Salma Hayek joining him as Carolina and Steve Buscemi opening the film with one hell of a bar story. Rodriguez takes the scrappy energy of El Mariachi, adds studio money and somehow keeps the handmade swagger intact.

The Rock (1996)

Alcatraz. Chemical weapons. Sean Connery. Ed Harris. And Nicolas Cage playing an FBI chemical weapons specialist named Stanley Goodspeed. Michael Bay delivers a giant action film that remains a standout in his filmography.

Goodspeed is sent onto the former island prison with Connery’s mysterious former inmate after Harris’ rogue general takes hostages and threatens San Francisco. It’s loud, slick and shamelessly over the top, with Cage just beginning the wonderfully unhinged action-star run that would also give us Con Air and Face/Off in the space of about a year.

Mission: Impossible (1996)

Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt feels almost restrained here compared with the man who would later hang off planes and launch motorcycles off cliffs.

Brian De Palma turns the old television series into a twisty espionage thriller, with Hunt going rogue after a mission ends disastrously and suspicion falls on him. The near-silent CIA vault scene remains one of the franchise’s classic set-pieces, with Cruise dangling inches above the floor while everyone in the audience forgets to breathe. It’s a decidedly different film in tone from the action spectacle the franchise would later become.

Executive Decision (1996)

Kurt Russell leads one of those ’90s action thrillers that tends to prompt an immediate, “Oh yeah, that movie’s good.” He plays intelligence analyst David Grant, who joins a commando team attempting the extremely questionable idea of boarding a hijacked passenger jet in mid-air.

Stuart Baird directs a cast that also includes Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, David Suchet and Steven Seagal. Seagal was marketed heavily alongside Kurt Russell, making what happens surprisingly early in the film quite a shock for cinemagoers at the time.

Con Air (1997)

Nicolas Cage’s mullet deserves at least partial credit here. Simon West’s wonderfully excessive action favourite has Cage playing newly paroled Cameron Poe, whose flight home goes very badly when a collection of dangerous prisoners takes over their transport plane.

John Malkovich is magnificent as Cyrus “The Virus” Grissom, with John Cusack, Ving Rhames and Steve Buscemi helping make this one of the most stacked casts in ’90s action. There’s a stuffed bunny, a flying prison and a Las Vegas finale that just keeps escalating. It’s ridiculously cool AF.

Face/Off (1997)

An FBI agent surgically swaps faces with the terrorist who murdered his son. The terrorist then wakes up, steals the agent’s face and takes over his life. Somehow, John Woo makes this completely ridiculous premise work.

Cage and John Travolta get to spend most of the film impersonating each other, which means both are encouraged to go very, very big. Gunfights, speedboats, slow motion and Woo’s obligatory doves all follow. The casting could have been even stranger: pairings reportedly considered during development included Stallone and Schwarzenegger.

Air Force One (1997)

Harrison Ford plays the President of the United States, and this president is not content to hide in a bunker while terrorists take over his plane.

Wolfgang Petersen traps Ford aboard Air Force One with Gary Oldman’s ruthless hijackers, while Glenn Close handles the crisis from the White House as Vice President. Ford brings exactly the right amount of gruff decency to a film that is essentially about the POTUS throwing hands with international terrorists. “Get off my plane!”

Starship Troopers (1997)

“Would you like to know more?” Paul Verhoeven takes a shiny sci-fi war movie about beautiful young soldiers blasting giant alien bugs and turns it into a savage satire of militarism, fascism and propaganda. It’s also just a kick-ass giant-bug movie.

Casper Van Dien, Dina Meyer, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris and Michael Ironside head into humanity’s war with the Arachnids, where limbs disappear with alarming regularity. Plenty of viewers and critics didn’t quite know what to make of it in 1997. Its reputation has only grown since.

Blade (1998)

Before the MCU and even before X-Men, Wesley Snipes was already making a Marvel superhero look effortlessly cool on the big screen.

Stephen Norrington directs Snipes as Blade, the half-human, half-vampire “Daywalker” hunting the creatures living secretly among us. Stephen Dorff’s Deacon Frost wants to kick-start a vampiric apocalypse; Blade would prefer he didn’t. The blood-rave opening still absolutely rips, and the film became one of Marvel’s first genuine big-screen commercial successes.

Ronin (1998)

John Frankenheimer gets Robert De Niro, Jean Reno, Natascha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård and Sean Bean together to steal a mysterious briefcase. Nobody trusts anybody, allegiances keep shifting and the contents of the case barely matter.

What does matter: the driving. Ronin has some of the finest practical car-chase work of the decade, sending vehicles screaming through narrow European streets with a weight and danger that’s increasingly hard to fake.

Enemy of the State (1998)

This relentless chase film finds Will Smith’s comfortable life obliterated after evidence of a political murder is unknowingly slipped into his possession, putting him in the sights of a government surveillance operation capable of watching almost everything he does.

Tony Scott pairs Smith with Gene Hackman and surrounds them with satellites, trackers, cameras and paranoid techno-thriller energy. Jon Voight makes a suitably cold villain, while Regina King gives the chaos some personal stakes. Yeah, the technology has dated. The anxiety behind it has only grown.

The Matrix (1999)

By 1999, Reeves had already made Point Break and Speed. Then the Wachowskis handed him a long black coat, some kung fu training and a question about whether reality itself was real.

Reeves’ Neo discovers humanity is living inside a simulation controlled by machines, with Laurence Fishburne, Carrie-Anne Moss and Hugo Weaving joining a film that mashes together cyberpunk, philosophy, Hong Kong martial arts and groundbreaking visual effects. Then bullet time arrived and seemingly every action movie, ad and music video wanted a piece of it. A genuine game-changer.

The Mummy (1999)

Brendan Fraser fighting an ancient undead priest while Rachel Weisz discovers that archaeology can be extremely hazardous employment. What a way to finish the decade.

Stephen Sommers turns Universal’s classic monster into a huge, breezy action-adventure, sending Fraser’s Rick O’Connell and Weisz’s Evelyn Carnahan to Hamunaptra, where they accidentally unleash Arnold Vosloo’s Imhotep. Interestingly, Universal had spent years developing various darker, lower-budget takes before Sommers pitched the swashbuckling version we got. Good call.

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Thirty films later, the point pretty much makes itself. The ’90s could deliver something as hard-edged as Heat or Ronin, something as gloriously absurd as Con Air or Face/Off, and then finish the decade with The Matrix helping to redefine the visual language of action cinema almost overnight. And yes, there are plenty more titles we could have included. What a glorious decade.